(November 5, 2014 at 8:55 am)Ben Davis Wrote: It's great news for US humanists. In the UK (and most other European countries), we've had that level of recognition for many years now. Why the headline refers to 'atheists', I'm unsure. The Federal Court was reviewing humanism, not atheism. If it had been, it could never have reached that decision because atheism could never be classified as a religion under any accurate definition.
NO it is not. This short term well intended tactic misses long term human behavior. It is easy to focus on the compassion of today in one group, but that misses the point that anything that forms a group IN ANY ASPECT of a society, be it political party, business, nationalism OR RELIGION, can in the future go on to become abusive.
Religion is poison and anything can be a religion, meaning being married to an idea. We are NOT a separate species and we have always been capable of the same range of cruelty and compassion.
Our behavior is not dictated by the labels we invent or the ideas we come up with. It isn't that we should never have ideas or form groups, but that we as a species fail to see the bigger evolutionary picture.
I do NOT have everything in common with other atheists, or even everything in common with liberals, even if I agree with many of the compassionate ideas they have.
There still are other atheists who do not share the same economic views such as Ayn Rand atheists. And I also do not agree with political correctness as a tactic to keep the peace.
We will always be a diverse species even within the same camps. We are still individuals. We can have our labels and clubs and form groups without elevating it to the dogmatic level of the word "religion".
Nothing in life should ever be set up to a dogmatic level and "religion" is the worst way humans group. It allows us to focus too much on our differences and not enough on our common existence.
